IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 6

the computer has featured a small
number of truly innovative people.
Names such as Turing, Licklider,
Kay, Charles Babbage, and Grace
Hopper should be better known.
Perhaps more interesting would
have been a text that concentrated closely on a select group of
true innovators. The opportunity
to examine these key innovators
might have uncovered similarities in
approach, background, or drive that
could be insightful. As it is, this text
is a serviceable history of computing, as viewed through a particular
lens. Of course, one could argue
that this is the real aim of the book;
to tell the story of the development
of the computer to readers who are
most interested in people.
In the conclusion of the book,
Isaacson wraps the narrative around
to suggest how Ada Lovelace would
consider the development of the computer thus far. This chapter begins
with a slightly dismissive conclusion
regarding what Turing referred to as

the "Lovelace Objection" to the notion
of "thinking machines," that machines
will be able to originate thoughts of
their own. This is part of a much bigger discussion, and it feels artificial,
simply Isaacson's way of completing
the circle through this history, rather
than a meaningful conclusion. There
is finally some comparative discussion
about some of the innovators mentioned in the book, but it's too little,
too late.
That does not diminish what it
is in this text that is very welcome.
All too often overlooked, the inclusion of people less well known in
the popular understanding of the
history of the computer is a valuable
contribution. However, for a text that
purportedly focuses on the innovators, there is too little exploration of
the "why": Why these particular people? Throughout the work, despite
the title, it is clear that the advance
of the technology is the driving factor behind the narrative, more than
the people behind the innovation.

While it is true that there are instances where the key innovator directly
influenced the nature and direction
of the technological development, it
is equally true that for other developments, including the computer
itself, it is not so clear that the history rests with a single individual, and
a book myopically focused on this
one mechanism to tell the story of
technology seems to, at best, create
problems in telling a coherent story.
At the same time, there are many
different pathways to the discovery
of new information, and those that
are drawn to the stories of people
and personalities can use this text
as a way to discover the interesting
development of the computer as the
ubiquitous information machine that
continues to shape our lives.

Author Information
Nick Webb is Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Computer
Science, Union College. Email:
webbn@union.edu.

Erik L. Stayton

Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine
By Jonathan Coopersmith, Johns Hopkins University Press. 320 pages, 2015

h a ve n eve r h a d
much interaction
with fax machines.
Despite having been
born during the era
in which the sales and use of fax
were expanding rapidly - the chap-

I

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2499344
Date of publication: 17 December 2015

6

ter "The Giant Awakes" in Coopersmith's Faxed - I came of age in a
house with not only a fax machine
and copier, but a digital scanner
and Internet-connected computer,
against which the poor facsimile
machine always seemed curiously
antiquated. Like the advocates of
digital communications technologies, I found myself blindsided,
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

perplexed by the popularity of analog transmissions in an age that
promised electronic, multimedia
messaging. And the fax seemed old
because it was old, its provenance
coming from Scotsman Alexander
Bain in the mid-19th century. Yet
it was successful because it was
simple to use and ubiquitous, and
was ubiquitous because it had
∕

december 2015



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